Relating the Gift

Abstract

The last chapter focused on how relations between things and people are remade in social interactions, including talk, writing, dusting, commemorating the dead and the other work of home. It emphasised how seemingly static displays of objects can be understood as ongoing processes of identity, as both relation and performance, intimately connected with the politics of family, home and beyond. This chapter focuses on a particular sort of thing/process, the gift, since this allows close scrutiny of the frictions between the different demands of identity work. In late modernity, the aestheticisation of everyday life by individual consumers (Featherstone 1991) is a sociological concept embedded in, and also confirming the notion of the late modern individual. However, the ambiguous status of the gift-fordisplay is a dimension of domesticity that questions this. Working through the idea of the gift as a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1979, 1986) also disturbs other ‘givens’, such as the mantelpiece and, in turn, the home as present practice.

To ask about the gender of the gift, then, is to ask about the situation of gift exchange in relation to the form that domination takes in these societies. It is also to ask about the ‘gender’ of analytical concepts, the worlds that particular assumptions sustain.

(Strathern 1988: xii)